The availability of device quality, uniform, large area semiconductor films with submicron thicknesses offers the possibility of the first accurate determination of many important physical parameters, such as elastic and inelastic electron scattering cross sections, in addition to enabling the fabrication of new devices, such as the Opposed Gate Source Transistor (OGST), with much higher performance than those currently available; [see Berenz et al., Proc. Eighth Biennial Cornell Conf. on Active Microwave Semiconductor Devices and Circuits, Aug. 12, 1981, pp. 75-85].
There are currently only two techniques for producing thin, self-limited films of silicon. The first one uses an ethylene diamine-pyrocatachol-water solution to fabricate highly boron doped submicron films of silicon; [see Huang et al., Appl. Phys. Ltrs, 25: (1974) 753; IEEE Trans. on Electron Devices, D-23 (1976) 579-583; and Finne et al., Jour. Electrochem. Soc., 114 (1967) 965-970]. This technique, however, is only applicable to silicon, and even so produces degenerately doped films with a high dislocation density; [see Yeh et al., Jour. Electrochem. Soc., 116 (1969) 73-77]. In the second technique, wafers of n.sup.+ silicon with n-type epitaxial layers were anodically etched to produce device quality films of n-type silicon. The thinnest films that could be produced in this manner, however, were only about 2 microns thick; [see van Dijk et al., Jour. Electrochem. Soc., 117 (1970) 553-554].